TW: The theme of today’s interview is “What have you learned from your American Life.” So I’ve got 17 questions for you.

Glass: Are you taping, or are you taking notes?

TW: I’m taping.

Glass: You’re taping. Good. Great.

TW: I’ll just get going. What have you learned from playing poker.

Glass: I’ve learned that I’m not as convincing a liar as I thought I might be. I’ve learned to just watch other people while doing math in my head.

TW: Nice.

Glass: Is that enough? Should I keep going.

TW: Yes, sir.

Glass: Because I can tell you what happens is when I sit down at a live poker game, for the first half-hour I do just fine. But then I become utterly readable to people, and then I steadily lose money. Whereas, online, I do a lot better. I think what that means is online, people can’t tell exactly what I’m thinking at all times, once they know me for 20 minutes.

TW: What have you learned from great storytellers?

Glass: I’m not sure. I mean, it’s funny. It’s hard to answer a question without getting all grand and corny. I mean, I don’t think I’ve learned a general thing from great storytellers. I think there are a lot of just very funny, very interesting people who I’ve been lucky to have an excuse to talk to for the radio show. And, mainly, that’s just really fun. I wish I were a wise enough person to have learned something overall from it. But, in fact, mostly what I think about the experience I have talking to somebody, who is a really great storyteller, mostly, is really incredibly enjoyable. I think sometimes people talk about storytelling like it’s this precious, greek urn that we have to keep in a museum and go and stare at, when, really, good storytelling is just there for fun.

TW: What did you learn from spending time with Mike Phillips.

Glass: Well, I learned that if I didn’t have use of any of my limbs, but could still run a computer, that may not be too terrible.

TW: He seemed to be having a good time.

Glass: It’s one of those things where you think before it happens, before you think about what that would be like, you think, “Well, that would be really horrible.” And, certainly, there’s a big downside to it, but, I don’t know, there’s a lot in his life.

TW: What have you learned from David Sedaris?

Glass: I mean, Sedaris is just a really amazing writer, in that the work is really funny. But most of it, at its core, has a kind of yearning emotion to it … Even in the latest stories he does, you get a sense of him as a three-dimensional person, in a way that, for example, in my own writing, I certainly don’t achieve. I mean, it’s because I’m reading this stuff out loud over the radio that it has personality to it. Whereas, David’s, I don’t know, so much of him comes through in ways big and small, in even the smallest essays.

TW: Now this is one that I don’t expect you to give me any more than one (answer), because you could give me 50,000, but what did you learn from your late mother. Something small?

Glass: Well, it’s hard to say, because my mom would say that the thing that’s at the core of the work I do, which is listening to other people, was basically at the core of her work also, which she was a therapist. And she was trained to be a therapist when I was in junior high school, so we talked about what she was learning a lot during that period. And, I mean, I guess that would be it.

TW: This is another one of those grand things, but what is one little thing that you learned about being married? Ira: Well, I got married really late. The thing I learned once I was married was that it was nothing to fear. I was in my forties before I got married. I got married to somebody who I had known for 15 years — or almost 15 years. As soon as we got married, I thought, “Well, why didn’t we do this a decade ago?” It really didn’t make any sense that we had waited so long. That says so much about me in such a compact set of words. I think I was really immature about the whole thing.

TW: What did you learn from watching episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”

Glass: Buffy is a really great show, and for people who loved it, they understand it. And for everybody else who didn’t watch it, I think it’s a real mystery why some of us hold it in such huge esteem. Buffy was very funny, and casually funny … It had a bunch of characters that I really loved. Then just some really beautiful moments. There’s this thing that Buffy says in one of the last couple of seasons, where they are up against something, like a force of pure evil, and she says this speech that’s sort of a big, long, kind of faux Shakespearean speech. At some point, she says, “In all of this world, there’s only one thing that’s stronger than evil.” Then she pauses and says, “That’s us.” And I remember I saw it, I had it on the TiVo. I just kept backing it up and watching that speech over, and over and over, just at the cleanness of the construction of the whole speech, which is building and building and building to that moment. It’s funny, because when Obama started running for office, one of his big lines actually was: “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” which I took as a kind of, I’m sure he wasn’t a big Buffy fan, but it always seemed to be a reminder. No, he wasn’t quite as eloquent as Buffy in his phrasing of it. And, you know, he’s a guy who’s known for some decent eloquence, and even he couldn’t beat the construction that Joss Whedon had given Buffy for that line.

TW: What have you learned from public speaking engagements?

Glass: What have I learned? I’ve learned I don’t have to dress like I’m going for a job interview. I’ve learned that, generally, people won’t stand and attack. I’ve learned that I better not say anything too super-important in the first 30 seconds, because people are getting so used to looking at my voice coming out of my head that that is overriding any content that I could be saying.

TW: What have you learned from being a celebrity?

Glass: I’m kind of a grade-B celebrity. I’m sort of a minor celebrity. I mean, public radio celebrity is actually different than real celebrity, you know what I mean? I’m not really stopped on the street, and cars don’t come screeching to a halt when I walk by. You know, the kind of a celebrity I am is where if I’m in a room full of people, who have listened to public radio, and have come out to see me in the four walls of that room, I’m famous. But as soon as I walk down the street to pick up a slice of pizza after the show, they have no idea who I am. So I guess the thing I’ve learned is right now there is a lot of different ways to be famous. I have to say, I think the level I’m at is the level I desire. I think being more famous seems a little more intrusive. And at this level, I can kind of get people on the phone who I need to get on the phone. Like, any writer who we would want to work with, chances are better than one-in-two that they’ve heard of the show, or they’ve heard of me, so they will at least take my call. So I get that benefit. And, yet, when I’m riding the subway out to Queens, I’m a completely anonymous person, which is kind of what you would want to be. And, generally, like 98 percent of the time, I’m a completely anonymous person. So that seems good.

TW: What have you learned about the differences between telling stories on the radio, and telling stories on television?

Glass: I’ve actually had so much to say about this, I’m not sure I can contain it in one answer. I mean, it’s funny, because in each one, you can take everyday life and raise it to feel like a fable. But on television, I think that’s harder, because you’re always dealing with the specifics of the actual people and the way they look and the space in which it happens, which it tends to ground the thing very completely on Earth. Whereas on the radio, from the get-go, you’re kind of creating this weird dream that’s in people’s heads. And so it’s easier for a story to feel like more in a way that is kind of counter-intuitive, sense, if you think about it, on TV you’re getting so much more information you would think that you would be able to make the story have more feeling. I mean, you’re getting all this visual information, in addition to the sound. But, as it turns out, when you have less information, when you’re not seeing, it actually is more conducive to a kind of grand feeling. So that’s kind of the big, macro level. At the micro level, some of the little things are that quotes work really differently on radio and TV, which seems like a small thing to say, unless you actually have had a job where you’re making something for radio or TV, where what you’re doing, really, if you think about it at it’s crudest level, is that you’re going out in the world and you’re getting quotes on tape. And then you’re just editing them down and putting them into an order. And so somebody like me, what my main skill is, or one of my main skills, is going out and getting people to say things in a way that they can be quoted and knowing how to arrange the quotes. I was really shocked to find that quotes that would be really beautiful on the radio simply don’t play as television. It’s interesting doing this interview for the paper, because I’m aware that some of the quotes that I’m giving you are much better radio than they are news copy. For example, the Buffy quote, “In all of this world, there’s only one thing stronger than evil.” Pause. “And that’s us,” works great, because I can actually pause and can use a tone of voice to understate it in a way that makes it really intense. But on the page, that’s just going to look like nothing, I think, you know? Whereas out loud, it’s like the greatest quote in the world. And between television and radio, there’s a disjuncture, too, which really shocked me, and, honestly, at the beginning, it really slowed down production of the TV show, because I would be editing a story and I would just choose all the wrong tape. And up to the very last story that we did for our second season, we ended up staying up all night doing the first four minutes of this episode about men named John Smith. We found guys named John Smith in different ages all over the country. The first four minutes is just this crazily beautiful montage of all their lives done really, really fast. And there’s a baby; and there’s a little kid; there’s a real young guy; there’s a guy who is a young dad and there’s an older dad, whose kids are just grown. And there’s a guy who is retiring. So basically you have seven guys named John Smith. There’s a guy near death. It just very quickly intercuts between them. The thing that kept screwing us up — and this is at the end of doing this for over two years — the thing that kept screwing us up is that we kept making their quotes in this four minute thing really interesting in a radio-way, where each one would tell a little story. And so it takes, at the minimum, to get across a couple of sentences in a story in a quote, you need 35-40 seconds. And so what happened is that if we let each one have a real complete emotional story, or have a real thought, or say something interesting, then the montage simply wouldn’t go fast enough. That you got the real thing it was built for, which was to jump from one of them to another. It was only when we made all their quotes really stupid that it worked as television. And so all the quotes are guy going, “When I got old, I just never got used to using a cane,” which is a moronic quote in print or on radio, but when you see the guy with the cane, what he becomes is a kind of symbol of an old man with a cane. And you don’t need him to say much, other than a feeling about it. All you need to know is that he’s not happy about it, and you can do that with this dumb quote. Whereas on radio, that quote, there’s no way that would be on the radio, and in the paper, same thing. To have an old guy say, “I just never could get used to walking with a cane.” You would never even consider it for a story. Whereas on TV, often the quotes are three or four seconds long. And it’s because people exist in a symbolic way on TV, very often. And especially in the context of this kind of thing, where we’re using them as symbols to represent people at a different stage in their lives. It’s almost like we’re making a commercial for growing old. You know what I mean? And for the idea of growing old. And so all their quotes were like the dumb quotes in a bad commercial.

TW: What did you learn from all those John Smiths?

Glass: I was just back here. I didn’t go out and meet the John Smiths. It was all done with our staff.

TW: I know, I listened to the commentary track on that (DVD), and I was like, “Where’s Ira?” But from watching that, some of my friends have watched it, and I’ve watched it a couple of times, there’s just something about that episode that it rings so true, and makes you think about your own life, and how you’re living it. Did you take anything from that episode, or was it just something you showed on TV? Or can you get that close? I mean, are you too close to it that you can’t have that amazing affect it causes?

Glass: Truthfully, the thing I’m getting a little stuck on here is the word “learned.” I’m not sure you learn from something like that. It’s more like you just feel something from a story like that. I definitely felt everything that everybody who watched it felt. I mean, it’s just a really emotional set of stories. So the problem is: “Did I learn.” I don’t think anyone learns anything from a story like that, other than life is really short, but you kind of know that going in. You don’t need some morons on TV to tell you that. To see it played out reminds you that life is really short.

TW: What did you learn from your greatest failure?

Glass: Frankly, there have been so many failures that I haven’t ranked them. I think you have to have very few failures to have a coherent ranking on an Excel spreadsheet. I mean, I’m somebody who I fail all the time. Half the stories I do, we kill. In my attempts to run a radio show, and work with other people, I say the wrong thing all the time and have to backtrack. And in my personal life, it’s a constant series of apologies. I don’t know, I was talking to this cop the other day in this interview we did, and he said, and I don’t think it will make it on the air, because it’s a little tangential to our story, but he said, “As a cop, you’re constantly making mistakes. Every five minutes you make some mistake when you start. Fortunately, you’re working in a situation, generally, where the stakes are kind of low, so it doesn’t matter. You just learn and you make fewer and fewer mistakes.” He said the thing it reminded him most of was being a parent. He estimated he made around 30,000 mistakes with each of his kids … But, he said, “Fortunately, you can’t break them, really … You just get another day and try to do it right the next day, and they seem fine. None of the mistakes were so big.” He said, “You’re working in a flexible system.” For me, I’m somebody, like in my case, one of the big dramas of my life was all through my twenties I wanted to make interesting work, but I just wasn’t very good at it. Sometimes when I give talks, like the one I’m going to be giving in Tulsa, I play some of the work I did when I was 26 or 27. I’ve been working for NPR since I was 19, so I’m seven years in. There’s some parts of the job that I was always good at, like I was always a fast little tape cutter and editor. But other parts, like writing or performing or interviewing, I was terrible at, and I play people, sometimes in my lecture, like a one-minute snippet from my career seven years into my career — and it’s horrible. And I’m not saying this in some false modesty. Like, it gets a huge laugh about how bad it is. Overcoming that by simply doing so much work, and so many stories, that I figured out how to do them was the big drama of my life for a decade. And that I threw everything into, and would create little projects and exercises for myself to figure out how to do something that was decent. And so I had a good seven-or-eight-year period of pretty much constant failure that I forced myself through. I think in a lot of people, if you do creative work, I think it’s really common that your ambition outstrips your ability for a long time. You just have to get yourself in a situation where you’re doing a lot of work so that you can develop the necessary skills and aesthetics to be decent. So, I mean, during the period, I had a feeling like my work wasn’t good enough, and I also thought that the things I was hearing on public radio weren’t interesting enough, didn’t have enough feeling and weren’t what they could be.

TW: Last two, and they’re kind of tied together. What do you want to learn?

Glass: Like in general?

TW: Yeah. What do you want to learn right now. What’s something that you don’t know, that you want to know.

Glass: Well, it’s interesting, because, I mean, basically the only time I’m happy at my job is if I’m kind of immersing myself in some new idea, or some new story, or something that takes me into some world. It doesn’t have to be super big. It can be the world of condo owners in Chicago under the economic collapse. I had a very pleasant two weeks thinking about how the recession is affecting people who live in apartments, if that makes sense. It doesn’t sound like much, but it turned out to be pretty colorful. So I feel like I need stuff like that to be happy, and not just feel like I’m a hack. On top of that, I’ve thought a lot recently about learning to play the piano. I’ve been hanging around a bunch of professional musicians, and people who write music, including somebody who came to the piano older. He was in his thirties, and now he can write songs and stuff. I was like, “That seems really cool.” Part of it is motivated by a small amount of jealousy that one of the producers of this radio show called “Radio Lab,” which is probably the most interesting show out there right now. It’s a cutting edge show, in terms of how you make a radio show in America. It just sounds like nothing else. One of the things it has going for it is that one of the producers composes all the music for this show. And so, in addition to being an interviewer and writer, he’s a hands-on composer. I feel like, “We’ll never catch up” — “This American Life” — until we have some basic composing skills. I feel like if I would learn to play the piano, I would learn how many years it would take of real work to learn how to compose music. I’m sure it’s impossible, but that’s my thought.

TW: OK, last one. What would you like to unlearn. Something you know that you don’t want to know anymore.

Glass: Hmm. Can you give me an example.

TW: I don’t know. You know, it could be really cheesy. I write these questions down and I don’t think about what I would like to unlearn. It’s kind of a hard question.

Glass: It’s a really hard question. You know how, as an interviewer, you can sometimes ask a question that’s better than any answer that anyone can ever give. The question is so smart. And it’s so smart, because then you get into a situation where you want to run the question, because the question is so interesting, even though the answer is just the person saying, “Yeah, I agree with that.” That’s the story of my life. That happens to me once a week, because I have a question that is such a good question, and then it’s just impossible for anyone to answer. Then my ego is so huge that I feel like, “I’ve got to run this question, because it’s so good.”

TW: Well, that’s a good answer, unless you can think of something.

Glass: I’m afraid that perhaps we’ve both boxed ourselves into this situation. Something I wish to unlearn. Hold on.

TW: Like a bad habit, something you would like to have never picked up, or something you saw on the news. I wish I did not know all the things I see on the 10 p.m. news. It’s just too disturbing, I guess. That’s just me.

Glass: I’m even thinking through my vices. Do I wish I had never learned how to drink? And I think, “That would be a great answer,” but, no, I don’t wish that. I’m glad I can drink. Do I wish I had never tried any drugs? Let me think: No, I’m pretty glad I had those experiences. Then you try to think through things that people actually regret. Am I sad that I learned to gamble, and that I know the odds of all the hands in poker, and blackjack, for that matter? And I think, “No, I’m pretty happy about that.” I’m financially solvent. It’s not consuming my life. I’m feeling pretty good about that. Now I’m walking through, “Am I sorry I ever took a yoga class?” No, I’m good with that. This isn’t something I learned, but I sort of regret it. And that is, I had about a 15-year period where I didn’t own a television. Then, at some point, I bought a television when “The Sopranos” was in its first season, because I heard that television was different. So I started watching television. And now I think I have learned to watch television too much. I think there is too much television in my life. I still think television is great, and better than ever, but there’s just too much of it.

TW: There you go. Good answer.

Glass: OK.

TW: Thank you so much for humoring me.

Glass: Sure. No, it was a really good interview. A really weird interview. OK. Well, I’ve tried to live up to the standard you set with these questions, with actual answers. You know, as an interviewer, you feel like it’s karma if you can’t be a good interviewee. You feel like it curses you in some way, like, “Now you will get what you have given,” if you’re a bad interviewee. I feel it’s a matter of honor that I have to be a good interviewee and actually answer the answers in front of me. And you have made that very challenging and interesting all at the same time. So my congratulations to you.

TW: Thank you very much. And you have a wonderful day, sir.

Glass: Thanks.

Matt Gleason 581-8473   |   matt.gleason@tulsaworld.com

Read the edited excerpts.